Which is the best program to "back up hard drive"?

I was wondering which is the best program out for Windows XP Pro. to back up the whole Hard drive as image or other files. I heard "NORTON GHOST 2005" is pretty good. Had anybody had problems with "Norton Ghost 2005"?

Is there any other program out there? Is it worth backing up the whole hard drive? or I can just use "bootable Disks" to recover data.

Sorry, I don't have an answer for you but I'm in somewhat of a similiar spot as I'm about to reformat my computer although in my case I don't want to save everything I just want to clean it up, reinstall the operating system and the important things.

Once I tried using "Back up my PC" and when I did a reinstall none of my Windows Office programs would work.

I plan on making a complete back up on an external hard drive and then just as a precaution I'm also manually going to save all my important things to disk in case there's a problem with that. I figure with using an external hard drive I can check it before I reformat (can I ?). Anyone have any good experiences or advice?

Since we're on a related subject I hope you don't mind me posting below you and asking for any recommendations too.

I'm using Norton Ghost (Network ghost V 8.0 intel?? I think). Got it from the Techie at work to ensure I don't lose any important data at home. Came on two floppys, boot off one, put in the other and about 20-25mins to clone to my ext HDD. I've cloned back several times from the backup after clashes/bad installations etc. Has worked beautifully. Backup HDD (80GB Seagate in Caddy, with USB and Firewire) cost me about $200AUD. Bargain! No more System Restores here!.
Cheers,
Buck.

You can elect to create or restore an image from within windows and it will reboot and do it all for you (nothing else to do) it will also reboot at the end taking you back to windows. I've got a Sempron 2.3 (333) and 512 ddr ram (333) and a 3.7g partition can be restored in 4-5 mins !!!!!!!

You can also create boot disks/cdrs to create/restore images.

This is dirt cheap now as well - seen for around £7 on ebay (UK) and around $10 on ebay (USA).

Norton Ghost 2005 is a pain if you ask me. You can only create an image in windows and only restore one from the boot cd (dvd).